The river of heaven : poems / by Garrett Hongo

"The River of heaven is the 1987 Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets"

In its concerns and techniques, Hongo's second book, the 1987 Lamont Poetry Selection, suggests comparisons to Wordsworth and Whitman. Combining the former's preoccupation with personal remembrance and the latter's penchant for syntactic repetition and catalogs, Hongo attempts to dazzle the reader with megadoses of imagery both lush ("the harpstring shade of tree ferns'') and frank ("a patch of wild land full of blown garbage''). Sometimes he flirts with excess ("spider lilies and ginger flowers like paper cranes/ furling in the tongues of overgrowth''), but the character studies and first-person narratives that speak of life in nonwhite America attain an authority unobscured by imagistic mannerisms.